Thunderbolt Early Notes: Firmware in Cable, Boots From External Disk

Apple finally unleashed the real potential of Thunderbolt on Wednesday with their own $49 cable as well as RAID storage from Promise, and users have already been putting the technology through its paces to come up with some early anecdotes.

MacRumors is reporting on a pair of stories related to Thunderbolt I/O technology on the new MacBook Pro and iMac, now that Apple finally made available their own $49 cable on Wednesday, which debuted alongside four flavors of lightning-fast Promise Pegasus RAID storage starting at $999 for 4TB.

“A source within the telecom industry explained to Ars that active cables are commonly used at data rates above 5Gbps,” the report reveals. “These cables contain tiny chips at either end that are calibrated to the attenuation and dispersion properties of the wire between them. Compensating for these properties ‘greatly improves the signal-to-noise ratio’ for high-bandwidth data transmission.”

Early Thunderbolt benchmarks show huge speed gains over the previous FireWire 800 I/O, and as it turns out, the Thunderbolt ports currently in use on the MacBook Pro and iMac are capable of using optical cables, should they eventually come. “Optical cables were part of the original plans for Thunderbolt which promises to offer much higher speeds,” MacRumors notes.